It’s been a big week for aliens in Washington.
In a podcast that aired last weekend, former President Obama revealed that he believes in extraterrestrial life. Days later, President Trump declared that he would order Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other agency leads to start declassifying government files pertaining to alien life and UAPs, short for unidentified aerial phenomena – the mysterious sightings we once called UFOs.
In a Truth Social post on Thursday, Trump announced his plans, citing intense interest on a subject once lumped in with the paranormal. Interest in all things alien has surged in the last five years as the U.S. government began to release formerly classified documents, hold hearings, and generally acknowledge a topic once seen as too far out.
“I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters,” Trump wrote.
Obama wants to believe
Obama set off the current firestorm of excitement around alien life when he casually confirmed his beliefs in an interview with podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen. “They’re real but I haven’t seen them,” Obama said. “They’re not being kept in Area 51. There’s no underground facility unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.”
The comments generated so much buzz that he published an Instagram post the following day clarifying his thoughts: “Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there,” Obama wrote, adding that solar systems are so far apart that the odds are low we’ve been visited by aliens – and as president he never witnessed anything to convince him otherwise.
Trump promised to release the fresh documents after accusing Obama of divulging classified information in the interview when he veered into alien territory. “I don’t know if they’re real or not,” Trump told Fox News. “I can tell you, he gave classified information. He’s not supposed to be doing that — he made a big mistake.”
Obama’s comments weren’t his first time weighing in on matters extraterrestrial. In 2021, the former president told James Corden that UAPs are as real as anything else that the U.S. military observes.
“What is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are,” Obama said. A former president speaking candidly on the subject might be surprising, but Obama famously counts Liu Cixin’s elaborate thought experiment on an alien invasion of Earth, The Three-Body Problem, among his favorite books.
Extraterrestrial talk gains legitimacy
After decades of being shunned as a topic best left to the tinfoil hat set, the government has lent mysterious flying objects and alien life major heft in recent years.
In 2020, the Department of Defense published three clips of unexplained aerial phenomena observed by Navy pilots that had previously leaked to the public. The world’s most powerful military admitting that it couldn’t explain the strange behavior of some objects in the sky through intel or scientific means was a surreal, historic moment met with excitement from UAP enthusiasts.
That same year, the DoD formed a dedicated task force to investigate UAP sightings. “The mission of the task force is to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security,” the agency wrote in its announcement. Other explanations, like malfunctioning equipment and stray weather balloons, pose no threat and remain very much in the mix.
The government’s disclosures didn’t stop there. In 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a “preliminary assessment” on the topic to give Congress an overview of how the intelligence agency handles reports of mysterious flying objects, which are sometimes spotted by servicemembers. “We currently lack data to indicate any UAP are part of a foreign collection program or indicative of a major technological advancement by a potential adversary,” the agency wrote in the report, ruling out one possible avenue of explanation.
A year later, Congress held its first hearing on UFOs in more than 50 years. While testimony from Pentagon officials flatly rejected claims that the U.S. has knowingly been visited by alien spacecraft – a stance echoed by a more recent report – the government confirmed that it doesn’t always have an explanation for some of the things pilots spot in the skies. The truth remains out there, somewhere.